New York, despite its dependable insistent energy, is a shockingly malleable emotional experience. Being there will feel like what you bring to it: frustrating or liberating, exciting or scary, resplendent or drab. There’s something magical that can be felt there, something in between that slowly built intimacy that rewards becoming familiar with a place and those flashes of awe and beauty and wonder that you find traveling somewhere new. Because its streets and interiors and the infinite possible paths through them feel so radically different through different moods and times of day and seasons and periods in your life, it can feel like travel, keeping your eyes open wandering through this city. Because the physical landscape changes only slowly, and because that bedrock of material sameness can always be found beneath the set changes, lighting changes, and shifts in narrative frame, one can build a love of place here as well, that grounding and comforting knowing that is denied to those always on the move.
I remember driving very slowly down the island on the west side of the park, the air cool and warm, sweet, the windows open, and the achingly familiar phrases of Kind of Blue miraculously filling the air around me. I remember my thoughts lightly touching all those hours and months of searching or just wishing for a recorded song that would fit life like a glove, of being without that thrill of connection between events and the surrounding air’s vibration, the certainty that there was some perfect song just out of reach eating at me. I remember turning my attention back to my perfect moment, gliding downtown street light after street light, the moodiness of trees to my left, the accomplishment of stone walls to my right, and its serendipitous soundtrack, and being grateful.
I remember an immense gratitude for eye contact, for honesty, for understanding and companionship, for important conversation conducted without a burdensome seriousness born of its importance, looking out over a sweet potato and seitan loaf through a large window onto a honey colored night. I remember wondering what the lone diner at the table less than a foot to my left was making of all that was passing between us.
I remember walking on winding trails through Fort Tryon park in the twilight, filled with the ecstasy of having far removed myself from Nyack and all familiar spaces in mere minutes, Subaru be praised. I remember a quietness inside me, curiosity replacing fear when my thoughts turned to the future. I remember looking out over the shining river, which reflects the stars, and making an unspecific but firm mental plan to watch the sun set from that vantage point.
I remember the weight on my chest, the claustrophobia of the dark city, the loneliness of buses, the inadequacy of backpacks, as I arrived time after time from DC, my trips marking off blocks of time I was appalled to see slip by, each less satisfying than the last, each more anxious about the next, more apologetic, regretful, angry, lost. I remember the shock of skyscrapers, as I, wandering innocently out of a classical, harmonious, sunlit and most of all low city to the south found myself accosted by Fritz Lang’s palatial industrial nightmares, in the depths of Ridley Scott’s debased and cramped future, the sodium vapor streetlights pooling at the feet of glass, steel, and stone edifices of a vaguely sinister bent. I remember an undeniable dizzy thrill every time, craning my neck to try to take in these buildings and their bewildering height, every time, and surprise, every time, that my brain never learned to take this transition in stride. I remember arriving at that bare hour, when the industrial, mechanical processes that keep the city alive are all there is to see, like the respiratory system taking center stage in the otherwise inert sleeping body. I remember the Port Authority as a banal labyrinth and the eventual greeting or goodbye as all averted eyes and mixed feelings.
I remember looking out towards the Port Authority, like a scale model mothballed since a previous franchise installment (still lying in a pool of yellow light), and towards Times Square, and out over the river, and around the deck that held us, sitting on a roof in the west forties, eager and impatient, exhausted and hyper focused. I remember the words “cast iron” rolling through my head for a hour, running my hands over the deck furniture as I soaked up the night, overstaying my welcome.
I remember my certainty that after college, the way my life would be shaped, I would end up in New York, and that there I would be awesome, and my days would be full of indications of my youth, my awesomeness, and the perfection, the specialness, of my location. I remember how different the prospect of moving to the city felt before and after there was a legitimate possibility that I could live with friendly, connected young people I knew. I remember the gawky flutter of a moment that was me saying yes, and the dinner party a week later, which thanks to meticulous and loving post-production by my brain is etched in my memory as a cinematic affair, an elegant collection of colors, temperatures, the right notes played just so: bottles of beer, the fire escape, waltzing on the roof, potted plants in opened windows, courtyards viewed from above, conversations joined and lost, threads of the evening dissipating or paying off, the sky’s after sunset purples.
To be really honest, although I know no one was quite on the same page as me emotionally, this beer wine and lasagna shindig felt like what I imagine prom might feel like. There were all these tokens of adulthood, of independence: the bottles of beer, the swapping of small talk and life plans, the undirected migration of everyone to the roof and the feelings of freedom and possibility that the open sky above us evoked. I was uncertain as to whether I could take these things at face value, unsure if they could actually be happening, in my life, to me. I was unable to decide, or discern, whether I was witnessing transformation, adulthood, agency and independence, or whether I was going through the elaborate motions, playacting, dressing up in a tux and using my imagination years, decades away from being ready for the real deal, the wedding, the awesome life in the awesome city I thought was my destiny.
Something about a moment when one of the partygoers was half out of the window, on the fire escape, drink in hand, made me marvel at what a picturesque scene I’d wandered into, this fantasy of young adult life, this Friends episode. The evening ended with a whiff of prom night’s inevitable disappointment with reality, and my subsequent tenure as a resident of the Bronx will and can not be scripted, lit, and edited so lovingly as those few hours were. Still: I will be moving to New York, New York, big city of dreams, living among that dependable, insistent energy, making of it what I will, traveling by staying still. I’m looking forward to it.
This Joyful Noise 